When did fantasy movies get so dull and predictable? Hero boy and his brainy girl sidekick and his wiseass guy sidekick save the world. Again. It’s fantasy. It should show us stuff we’ve never seen before, perferrably in a way we’ve never seen before. It shouldn’t look so familiar and so–
Oh, hey: Nathan Fillion! Cool!
is he playing the corporate bad guy? or some kind of heroic mentor in disguise?
He’s playing Hermes.
It seems a bit odd that, after they’ve gone to all the trouble of grounding the first film in the modern world, they should abandon it for a re-telling of The Odyssey with just one or two high-tech toys. Still, apparently the book does the same thing.
I think fantasy film-making is like SF film-making: always about a generation behind the books. The people who control the way a film looks now were reading books as kids in the seventies, eighties and nineties. And, especially after The Lord of the Rings, that means endless series of Epics.
The Percy Jackson films, though, are based on a series of books which have only come out in the last few years, and are inspired more by Harry Potter than by Lord of the Rings.
Actually, though they came out after Harry Potter, the author, Rick Riordan, wrote them before but wasn’t able to get them published until after Harry became popular.
Ah, yes! I had read that, but had forgotten. Thanks for the correction.
I can’t speak to these particular books at all, not having read them — but I think the current trend for huge epic fantasy film series is rooted in the four- and five-book trilogies of the 1980s.
Which film series are you thinking of? Besides the LOTR/Hobbit and Narnia films (from books predating the 1980s). I’m noticing more fantasy films inspired by fairy tales (Snow White and the Huntsman, Jack the Giant Slayer, Hansel and Gretel, etc) and contemporary YA fiction (Twilight, Percy Jackson, Beautiful Creatures, the upcoming Mortal Instruments).
I think filmmakers are trying for the next Lord of the Rings. Most of the attempts are failing.
(You could put The Hunger Games in there with contemporary YA.)
What attempts are you thinking of?
Spoiler One would have thought that Michael Fassbender would have been a more appropriate choice to play Hermes…